Census officials continue to fall behind their goals for hiring local outreach staff, a critical component in promoting the 2020 census among the hardest-to-count populations in the country, agency officials told an advisory committee.

While several aspects of the preparations, including address verification, are on or ahead of schedule, the U.S. Census Bureau said it remains more than 200 people short of its goal of hiring 1,500 local partnership staff ahead of next year’s count. The hiring problems have come as the agency ramps up for the 2020 enumeration that will be used to determine the number of congressional seats for each state, how federal funds are allocated, and to structure economic surveys.

President Donald Trump may soon announce whether he will support a yet-to-be-written Senate bill expanding background checks for commercial gun sales, a bipartisan group of senators said Wednesday.

Trump spoke for about 45 minutes by phone with the trio of members at the center of background check talks. Sens. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., and Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., told reporters the president discussed options for securing a potential deal.

The House Judiciary Committee will meet next week to jump-start legislation addressing firearm ownership, an issue that has languished before Congress for more than two decades but faces new urgency in the wake of recent mass shootings that rattled the country.

Supporters of the legislation have scrambled over the summer recess to cobble together support and advance various proposals before the political will withers after recent shootings in Gilroy, California; Dayton, Ohio; and El Paso, Texas. A rampage in the West Texas community of Odessa over Labor Day weekend added to the concern. House Democrats have struggled with how far to push in the face of a GOP-controlled Senate and White House.

The Trump administration is moving to end a court settlement that limits its ability to hold migrants who cross the border into the United States, the Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday, potentially allowing for indefinite detention of children with their parents.

President Donald Trump and his administration for years have chafed at the limitations resulting from the settlement, known as the Flores agreement. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday the new policy would get rid of an interpretation of Flores that has “substantially caused and continued to fuel” a migrant crisis at the southern border.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee criticized the Justice Department for proposing “astounding and novel” limits on congressional investigations Tuesday as a means to win a lawsuit over a subpoena for eight years of President Donald Trump’s financial records.

Oversight’s filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit pushes back on a Trump administration strategy to stymie congressional investigations by limiting the scope of what they can seek from the executive branch.

President Donald Trump says New York Attorney General Letitia James is “closely coordinating with House Democrats in a joint effort to obtain and expose” the president’s tax returns and financial information.

The allegation came in a filing Monday in federal district court in Washington as Trump amended the July 23 lawsuit he brought to block James and Michael R. Schmidt, commissioner of New York state’s Department of Taxation and Finance, from providing the president’s state tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Census officials on Monday defended plans for next year’s count that they said would make it the “most efficient ever," as Democrats pressed the bureau to do more to ensure hard-to-count populations are not overlooked.

The latest salvo from Democrats came from members of the Illinois congressional delegation, led by Richard J. Durbin, the Senate minority whip, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, along with the rest of the state’s Democratic representatives. In a letter, they urged greater investment in outreach like Questionnaire Assistance Centers to avoid missing minorities, children, rural residents and the urban poor.

The Justice Department official at the center of the push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census has left the department, a person familiar with the decision confirmed Friday.

John Gore, who served as the Civil Rights Division’s principal assistant attorney general, authored a letter on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act that the Commerce Department used to justify adding a citizenship question to the census.

President Donald Trump surrendered his legal fight earlier this month to ask about citizenship on the upcoming census, but his administration is marching forward on a Republican strategy that could upend the way legislative districts are drawn nationwide to the benefit of the party.

Trump nodded to policy issues such as health care and education as reasons he issued a July 11 executive order for the government to compile citizenship information in a different way. And he accused “far-left Democrats” of being determined to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”

Less than 300 miles from the Arctic Circle, Toksook Bay, Alaska, has about 600 people, a dozen or so streets and averages a high of 12 degrees in January, the month the 2020 census will begin there.

The responses among Alaska Natives in Toksook Bay and throughout the state could have a huge impact on the future of their community, not just in terms of political representation but whether they have a roof over their heads.

The House voted Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress over the chamber’s probe into the administration’s now-abandoned attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The 230-198 vote on a contempt resolution came after weeks of conflict between the administration and the House Oversight and Reform Committee over subpoenas related to the addition of the question. President Donald Trump dropped it from the census last week after the Supreme Court blocked the plan, calling the administration’s rationale for it “contrived.”

The Census Bureau’s chief on Tuesday pushed back on concerns about cyberattacks and outreach in rural areas in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

In the first congressional testimony by a bureau official since the Trump administration dropped a citizenship question from the 2020 census, the issue was only briefly addressed. Senators instead focused on the implementation of the count next year, which will be the first to rely primarily on online responses. That change has raised fears of cyber intrusions and technology shortfalls.

President Donald Trump’s expected executive order adding a citizenship question to the census Thursday will meet a swift legal challenge, one the administration appears ready to fight to the Supreme Court again.

Trump said Thursday morning he would have a news conference on the census and immigration and a source familiar with his plans confirmed he will issue an executive order to add the question in response to a temporary block imposed by the Supreme Court in late June.

Warming up for the next round of the fight over adding a citizenship question on the 2020 census after setbacks in the courts, the Trump administration’s latest effort faces numerous hurdles in court that could spill out into Congress’ annual spending talks.

The administration has been coy about how it will try to relitigate the question, and Attorney General William Barr told reporters Monday the “pathway” to reinstate it may be unveiled later this week.

President Donald Trump has not given up on adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census despite court setbacks, administration lawyers said Friday, but the move faces numerous challenges amid ongoing preparations.

Following last week’s Supreme Court decision blocking the original rationale for the question, the administration started printing forms earlier this week without it. However, Justice Department lawyers filed papers with Maryland federal district Judge George Hazel on Friday, telling him the administration would continue to try to add the question — without detailing how.

The 2020 census will not include a citizenship question, the Justice Department said Tuesday, just days after the Supreme Court blocked a plan by the Commerce Department to add it to the census questionnaire.

Federal attorneys on Tuesday told litigants in the New York challenge to the case that it would not pursue the question. Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco confirmed that the government will move ahead with printing census forms without it.

GOP-held states with growing immigrant populations, Texas, Florida and Arizona, are more likely to gain House seats following the 2020 Census, as well as additional federal funding, if a citizenship question remains off, as the Supreme Court ordered on June 27. In this episode of the CQ on Congress podcast, CQ Roll Call reporter Michael Macagnone and Bryce Dietrich, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, discuss why Republican lawmakers continue to back President Donald Trump's plan to add it.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee will continue to investigate the addition of a citizenship query to next year’s census, Chairman Elijah E. Cummings said Thursday in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to block the question.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to block a citizenship question on the 2020 census, President Donald Trump said Thursday he will seek to get it approved, even if the national count is delayed.

Hours after the court in a 5-4 opinion held the administration had not properly justified its reason for adding the question, Trump tweeted that he asked attorneys to potentially delay the census in order to bring the case back to the court. That could run up against the administration’s June 30 deadline for adding the question and printing more than 1 billion census documents on time.

Two states that have the most on the line in the Supreme Court case over the citizenship question in the 2020 census are taking drastically different approaches to the decennial count next year.

New York and Texas could have the biggest swings in congressional representation after the 2020 census. New York is projected to lose two seats, and Texas could gain as many as three, according to forecasting by the nonpartisan consulting firm Election Data Services.